"Btw I have to give a shout out to the old school upstate NY Bhangra click, a mini-region that is still alive today."
I think this is a great thread, and that alot of great teams go unrecognized because of the region they may be in, or the fact that their name is not as big in comparison to others. Of course I am biased here, but I think the Upstate NY region really is unheard of, and should be differentiated from the NYC region.
With most of the great collegiate teams, alot are of the bigger school status (VCU, UNC, UVA, Cornell etc) and have very large Indian populations. I'm not trying to single us out or anything, but our school only has around 4,000 undergraduates, and our Indian population although exists, is not as prominent. If anyone has seen our team in the past, a majority of our team may not be of Punjabi descent, but are not even Indian or Pakistani or have any relation to any brown community whatsoever. On our current roster more than a third of our people come from different ethnic backgrounds, and this has always been the case for us, which means every year we literally start from scratch, from how to pronounce the word Bhangra to working up to dancing a full routine. Forget not having danced before, forget not ever hearing of or seeing Bhangra, a lot of our team has no knowledge of Indian culture at all when they first join. Yet each year we really have to work alot, (not saying we may work harder than other teams, every team works hard) to get people to understand the dance and culture itself, because I argue that dancing bhangra really is as much of a cultural aspect as it is just dancing; in order for us to try and be competitive with other independent and collegiate teams, where a lot of people have been dancing for quite some time and have had at least some exposure to Bhangra. And again not saying anything about dominance at all, but just for recognition sake, Rochester Bhangra, although unheard of by many people, has competed in places such as Blowout, VPD, JBD in Vancouver, Fever, to name a few. And that is against teams of people who have been dancing for years and had plently of exposure to the dance, versus a majority of our team who only learned what the word Bhangra was a month or so before.
We really don't have a lot of resources here, especially being in college, and each of us only getting exposed to Bhangra from our Freshmen year, as is the case with many collegiate teams, but I think that the fact that our diversity is so wide and variant, and the fact that we have to go back to square one each year not only with dancing but with everything Indian, and to learn all of that to try and put on a competitive routine within a semester is a pretty tough, and large deal. And I know there are many teams who do go through this in this region such as Geneseo, and other teams throughout North America, I just think that its something that should be noted.
I know this may not be alot about success, but if we're talking about underrated I think this is a major factor that should be taken into account.
